Eastern Rampart

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s emphatic return to power in Assam marks more than a regional electoral triumph. With Himanta Biswa Sarma sworn in for a second consecutive term after the NDA’s sweeping victory of 102 seats in the 126-member Assembly, the BJP has entrenched itself as the dominant political force across India’s eastern frontier. For the first time in Assam’s history, a non-Congress chief minister has secured two consecutive terms. That is a tectonic shift.

For decades, India’s eastern flank from Assam to Bengal was shaped by anxieties over porous borders, demographic change by Bangladeshi infiltrators and uneven state capacity. The BJP has now converted those anxieties into a durable political grammar. While Assam became the laboratory under Sarma’s forceful leadership, West Bengal under Suvendu Adhikari should become the next frontier.

Since succeeding Sarbananda Sonowal in 2021, Sarma has fashioned himself not as a custodian of Assamese identity and national security. His rhetoric has been muscular and he has been outspoken on the problem of Bangladeshi infiltration. Under him, the BJP ceased to appear as an outsider force in the Northeast.

That explains why Suvendu Adhikari travelled to Guwahati not merely as a guest at a swearing-in ceremony but as a political ally seeking inspiration. Adhikari’s praise of Sarma as an “elder brother” was more than personal warmth. It reflected the emergence of an eastern axis within the BJP centred on border vigilance and the consolidation of Hindu voters across linguistic and ethnic divides.

Assam and Bengal sit at the fault line of migration politics. Both have long wrestled with the consequences of illegal cross-border movement from Bangladesh. And both have witnessed deep political polarisation over how to respond to it.

The BJP’s calculation is straightforward. It believes that large sections of voters, particularly Hindus in border regions, feel abandoned by decades of equivocation from opposition parties who have appeased minorities for selfish political ends, even at the risk of compromising national security.

Assam and Bengal must work in tandem against the entrenched networks of illegal infiltration that have altered the demography and politics of border districts for decades. The issue has too often been trivialised by sections of India’s self-styled ‘liberal’ intelligentsia, who portray every discussion on infiltration as intolerance while ignoring the profound consequences of unchecked migration on local communities, security and social cohesion.

In several regions of eastern India, demographic anxieties are no longer abstract fears but lived political realities.

Himanta Biswa Sarma recognised early that porous borders are not merely an administrative nuisance but a civilisational and national-security question. Suvendu Adhikari appears determined to adopt a similar approach in Bengal, where allegations of cross-border infiltration and political patronage have become central to public debate. Together, the two leaders must form a coordinated eastern bulwark by sharing intelligence, strengthening border enforcement and politically isolating networks that enable illegal migration.